I have just finished a "Personal Reading Challenge" It was Henry James' "The Golden Bowl"- and it was really hard going. Sometimes I just like to read hard classics, when I get to the end I not only feel a sense of achievement but they are always thought provoking and rewarding.
I loved the themes in "The Golden Bowl" which are encapsulated in the metaphor of this strange golden bowl. It is not gold but crystal covered with gilt and has a strange fascination for some the main characters in the story. The golden bowl however has a fatal flaw ,and although it is not visible to the more discerning it is obvious that it is there.
In celebration of this book I'm introducing bowls I like. They are not gold and often contain a quality that in the perfection of industrial design would be considered flawed- I however, find them perfect and satisfying in their own way. As a metaphor in my life these bowls contain the rough and the smooth, they are comforting,rewarding and reveal unexpected subtelty with use...
Simon Reece, Australian potter. I drink tea from one of his cups everyday.
Ayumi Horie. Beautiful.
American potter
4 comments:
Thrilled to have found your blog, keep it comming, love Melissa
Thankyou for introducing these potter to me. I look forward to seeing more.
xx
Oh, I remembered that William Blake wrote this,
"Thel's Motto
Does the Eagel know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole:
Can Wisdom be put in a silve rod?
Or Love in a Golden bowl?"
from the begining of The Book of Thel, William Blake, 1789.
xx
I'm glad you enjoyed The Golden Bowl - it's one of my favourite books.
I wonder: Is the discipline to finish reading sometimes an artistic one? We're accustomed to moving from confusion & tedium to clarity & climax - we recognise the aesthetic payoff.
Put another way, sometimes we can see in other artforms our own struggle to create - and this familiarity motivates us to push on.
(We can be wrong, of course. I just read G.E. Moore's Ethics, and the 'moment of fulfillment' never arrived.)
Does this sound right?
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